By Edith Honan NEW YORK | Tue Nov 5, 2013 9:41pm EST NEW YORK (Reuters) – Liberal Democrat Bill de Blasio cruised to victory on Tuesday in the race to succeed New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, marking the first time a Democrat has captured City Hall in two decades, local media reported. De Blasio, the city’s public advocate, beat Republican rival Joe Lhota after a campaign in which he addressed economic inequality in America’s most populous city, CNN, New York 1 and the New York Times reported. “This election is a very stark contrast between two very different candidates. Mr….

y Victoria Cavaliere ASBURY PARK, New Jersey | Tue Nov 5, 2013 9:15pm EST ASBURY PARK, New Jersey (Reuters) – New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie won re-election in a landslide on Tuesday, a victory seen boosting his widely expected bid for the White House in 2016. Christie was projected the winner, within minutes of the polls closing, by CNN, CBS and NBC. The Republican incumbent was ahead of his Democratic challenger, state Senator Barbara Buono, by 60 percent to 38 percent, according to the first precincts counted, according to NJ.com. Cheers erupted among hundreds of supporters at the Asbury…

-If you’re Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and you’re sweating an upcoming vote, the solution isn’t to campaign more. No, the obvious answer is to move Christmas. Maduro announced last week that Nov. 1 would herald the arrival of “early Christmas” in Venezuela, “because we want happiness for all people.” Per Fox News Latino, Maduro sealed the deal by lighting Nativity lights at the Presidential Palace of Miraflores over the weekend and announcing that workers in the country will receive most of their bonuses and pensions nearly a month early. Critics (and grinches) point out that, as a function of early…

-Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) gave an interview to The New York Times to announce that he was “restructuring” his office — but not firing anyone — after plagiarism allegations that surfaced last week continued to mount on Monday. “What we are going to do from here forward, if it will make people leave me the hell alone, is we’re going to do them like college papers,” he said Tuesday. “We’re going to try to put out footnotes. We’re going to have them available. If people want to request the footnoted version, we’re going to have it available.” However, Paul’s problems…

QuestCinq.com/HealthCare LA GRANGE, Ky. — Kelli Cauley’s fingers raced over her keyboard as she asked the anxious woman at her side a series of questions. What was her income? How many people lived in her household? Did she smoke? (“That’s the only health question it asks,” Ms. Cauley said of the application they were completing.) The woman, a thin 61-year-old who refused to give her name, citing privacy concerns, had come to the public library here to sign up for health insurance through Kentucky’s new online exchange. She had a painful lump on the back of her hand and other…

QuestCinq.com By James Mann, Published: October 31 James Mann, a resident fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is the author of “Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet.” He is working on a biography of George W. Bush for the American Presidents series. We are in the midst of a wave of revisionism about George W. Bush and his administration. For years, amid the rancor of the Iraq war, Bush was often portrayed as a simple idiot or sometimes as a demonic manipulator. More recently, amid an outpouring of coverage prompted by the April opening of the George W. Bush…

– India launched its first rocket to Mars on Tuesday, aiming to put a satellite in orbit around the red planet at a lower cost than previous missions and potentially positioning the emerging Asian nation as a budget player in the global space race. The Mars Orbiter Mission blasted off from the southeastern coast with the satellite scheduled to start orbiting Mars by September, searching for methane and signs of minerals. “This is our modest beginning for our interplanetary mission,” said Deviprasad Karnik, spokesman for the state-run Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). Only the United States, Europe, and Russia have sent probes…